Shaping Voters’ Choice: Candidates’ Personal Attributes and Ballot Information

• In Event: How Do Voters Choose?

Abstract

Candidates’ images have become an important determinant of voting decisions in modern elections. As such, candidates’ pictures have increasingly been included in ballots used in most Latin American democracies. Candidates’ images provide informational cues in which voters often rely on to make voting choices, especially when they are ill-informed about candidates’ and parties’ ideological and policy positions (Matson and Fine 2006, McDermott 2005, Banducci et al. 2008). They do so by employing stereotypes based on physical characteristics (i.e. gender, race, age, attractiveness), which also provide the means to build their perception about candidates’ personality treats relevant for a politician (i.e. competence, honesty, integrity, etc.). While positive stereotypes benefit candidates’ probability to receive a vote, negative stereotypes hinder this probability (Todorov et al. 2005, Wills and Todorov 2006).
However, candidates’ images and physical attributes are not presented to voters in a vacuum; their images are linked to contextual information. In an election, the informational cues provided by candidates’ pictures are presented to voters in combination with information about their candidacy, which includes their name, party label, order in the ballot, and office for which they are running. As such, I explore whether the contextual information provided in the voting booth combined with judgment of candidates’ physical attributes offers a better estimate on the actual votes received by the candidates.
An experimental design provides the opportunity to empirically measure the effects that variables surrounding an election have in a more controlled environment (Morton and Williams 2011). I intend to obtain a measure of trait inference from physical appearance by asking subjects to judge the degree to which candidates shown in a series of pictures are attractive, likeable, competent, trustworthy, attractive, etc. (Wills and Todorov 2006). I test how a candidate’s appearance observed in their ballot picture, and the perceived personality traits based on such picture, affect candidate probability of being voted, and how this probability changes when provided contextual information offered by the ballot. I use actual ballots from the most recent congressional elections in two Latin American countries that use open list multimember proportional representation system with panachage (El Salvador and Ecuador). I then compare the information gathered with candidates’ actual electoral performance in the election. I expect perceptions of physical attributes and personality treats to vary when mediated by contextual information, and that the perception formed through images including candidacy information to be a better voting predictor than those formed through images with no additional information.

Author

• Carolina Tchintian, Rice University